Kalyan-Dombivli buildings may get a chance to pay up

MUMBAI: After Ulhasnagar, it’s Kalyan-Dombivli’s turn to get unauthorised structures regularised. The state government is considering a move to legalise illegal structures in Mumbai’s satellite township of Kalyan-Dombivli.

Chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who holds the key urban development portfolio, on Monday asked the Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation (KDMC), Thane collector, and legislators from the district to chalk out a master plan for the township. Mr Deshmukh asked the officials to see if unauthorised structures in Kalyan-Dombivli could be regularised by charging penalty.

Responding to a public interest litigation on August 2, a division bench of the Bombay HC directed KDMC officials to immediately demolish 389 illegal structures in the town. The next hearing on the PIL is scheduled for August 24, when the master plan could be submitted to the Bombay High Court, Mr Deshmukh told a meeting at the Mantralaya.

Following the HC order, the KDMC had actually began a demolition drive and its bulldozers have hit close to 25 structures so far. However, the state government succumbed to pressure from all political parties who called for saving the unauthorised structures on the grounds that the township never had a proper master plan for development in place since the independence.

A steering committee was set up by the state to recommend a line of action to the government. The steering committee members met the chief minister on Monday and demanded a bail-out package for Kalyan-Dombivli on the lines of the one given to Ulhasnagar, sources told ET.

“If the politicians called for a special favour to Ulhasnagar because it is a refugee township, a similar sop is being demanded for Kalyan-Dombivli now on the grounds that people built their homes on available government and private land in the absence of a development plan,” a senior bureaucrat who attended the meeting said.

Earlier this year, the state government promulgated a special ordinance to regularise all illegal structures in Ulhasnagar that had come up prior to January 1, ’05. The move followed a judgement by the HC ordering immediate demolition of 855 illegal structures in Ulhasnagar.

But the ordinance, later converted into a bill and passed by the legislature, regularised all illegal structures in Ulhasnagar except those that have come up on government land, thus nullifying the HC order.

The ordinance asks offenders to pay penalty for getting the eligible unauthorised structures regularised. According to knowledgeable sources, the ordinance saved thousands of structures in Ulhasnagar from demolition.

Ironically, Mr Deshmukh had maintained that no such favour would be granted to any other city or town in Maharashtra and that Ulhasnagar was an ‘exceptional case.’ In Kalyan-Dombivli, the Thane district administration has identified around 4,500 unauthorised structures.